Q3 quants emerge as coding floor

The practical floor for coding is usually Q3, not Q2. Q2 can work on a strong base model in narrow, short-context workflows, but the failure modes show up quickly in exact token prediction, syntax fidelity, and longer-horizon reasoning.

• –Q4 is still the safer default when you want fewer retries, cleaner edits, and more stable instruction following
• –Q3 is often the best system-level tradeoff if it unlocks a larger model or leaves more room for KV cache
• –Q2 is mainly a capacity play, not a quality play; it makes sense when VRAM is the hard constraint
• –Q1 is usually experimental for coding unless the task is trivial or the underlying model is unusually resilient
• –The real comparison is base model strength plus context budget, not quant size alone; a stronger model in Q3 can beat a weaker model in Q4